why i'm not on facebook

the $64,000 question: why the hell am i not on facebook?

 

well, it started off as simply my way of saying, "fuck you" to social networking; i didn't want to be one of the millions who joined just because everyone else did.  this is a habit of mine in life: if everyone loves something then i'm less likely to see/do/drink/smoke/read/buy/lick/love it.  it's a silly thing, i know, but it's a part of who i am so i just don't fight it.

 

but then, over the years, i started seeing friends trickle away from my life one-by-one.  they stopped emailing me, stopped texting me, and i didn't received invites to parties anymore.  all-in-all, i started losing friends and i had no idea why.  it wasn't till i started having people ask why i wasn't at a party or at the bar or at a movie did i realize it was because those friends had swapped physical and traditional contact with other humans for the face-less social network called facebook. 

 

it was also around this time that i started noticing that when people ran into each other after not seeing each other for weeks/months/years, the first comment out of their mouths were, "are you on facebook?"  not, "how ARE you!?!?!"  or  "what have you been up to!?!?!?"  or  "let's get together!!!"  but, rather, "are you on facebook?"  for some, this was out of the mouths before the other person had a chance to fart.  most commonly, these conversations ended abruptly as the other person ran off to their more important task at hand.

 

what happened to the days of standing around in the condom aisle at target to catch up with that extra-special person you just ran into with whom a condom broke seven years ago?  laughing at the irony of running into them and wondering if you could give it another try for old times sake?

 

what happened to having conversations at parties that didn't revolve, almost entirely, around what so-n-so said on facebook the other day or how funny their status was or where they went to happy hour?

 

what happened to seeing some hot thing at the mall, sneaking into the nearest changing room, and getting it on - or sitting in the mall food court to laugh at people walking by.  now, people just flirt online (sometimes without even hooking up - what a waste) or they just spend hours on facebook looking at other people's pics, and then their friend's pics, and then their friend's friend's pics?

my husband just joined facebook a few weeks ago - he has caught up with some old friends and connected with existing ones, but i keep asking him - how deep are the actual conversations, if you can call them that at all?  sure, i over-the-shoulder facebook occasionally but i get sick of it and wander off within minutes.

my only question is, if you have 500 friends on facebook, how many of them are actual friends?  does knowing when someone went to target or the bathroom or to bed substantiate "friendship?"